Plans for working on battery life

[Febs]

Peter, the issue with battery life, as I mentioned before, has more to do with a lack of documentation regarding the iPod hardware than it does a lack of interest on the part of developers.  On every platform on which Rockbox is reasonably mature (Archos, iriver), Rockbox has achieved battery life that equals or exceeds the original firmware.

Read through these forums or search in the developers' mailing list and you will see that correcting battery-drain issues is "critical" with respect to the decision to have a Rockbox release.  Likewise, you can see that battery life is the first "Known Issue" reported on the IpodStatus wiki page.

Bear in mind that Rockbox is an open-source project that relies on the voluntary contributions of unpaid developers.  Developers work on what they want to work on.   There is no way that we can direct a develop to focus on something specific.  If someone wants to write a game plug-in instead of troubleshooting power drain issues, well, then that's what they'll work on.

[steve-lainen]

Hi Febs.

Thanks for you reply I see what you mean. Maybe I was a bit harsh in my reply to Llorean.
No matter what I am very gratefull for the time the developers spend on this project (coming from a non-programmer).

Have a nice day all of you 

Peter

[Llorean]

I wish people would take me literally more often.. I did say that it was non-essential to DEVELOPMENT. I also said this handy bit:

As well, many many many other things will affect battery life (codec optimizations, possibly how we decide to use the second core, better graphics code, etc) so you can't really focus on it first, but rather fix everything else and then see if it's still a problem.

which pretty much tells you that battery life is something that will improve, but the best way for it to improve right now is to work on other things since many of those are what will make the big steps anyway.

[gummbah]

Llorean made a good point in another thread where he wrote battery fixes require discoveries regarding how the hardware works, and you can't schedule discoveries.

Actually it was this thread. First time I read it I was already not so convinced by this argument. Of course you cannot schedulre discoveries, but one can try to make them more likely, can't one? That's why loads and loads of money go into R&D.. to make discoveries more likely.

[Llorean]

My point on not being able to schedule them was merely in response to someone asking if it would be in by the November release. No matter how much effort you put into R&D, you cannot *guarantee* something will ever be done by a specific time.

I don't see how you can believe otherwise.

[linuxstb]

Rockbox doesn't need plans for working on ipod battery life, or people talking about plans for working on ipod battery life, it needs volunteers to actually do some hard work and spend their spare time figuring out how the PortalPlayer chip and the other hardware in the ipod works and/or optimising the existing code so we can run the CPU at a lower clock speed for longer.

[L]

Llorean made a good point in another thread where he wrote battery fixes require discoveries regarding how the hardware works, and you can't schedule discoveries.

Actually it was this thread. First time I read it I was already not so convinced by this argument. Of course you cannot schedulre discoveries, but one can try to make them more likely, can't one? That's why loads and loads of money go into R&D.. to make discoveries more likely.

Too bad no money is going into R&D in this project. Care to donate some?

[Llorean]

Yes, will a fully staffed development lab, and a few people being paid full time to reverse engineer the hardware, I'm sure some progress could be made.

[gummbah]

And then sell your product way to expensive to us, no thanks 
I'l be patient and wait some more 

[L]

And then sell your product way to expensive to us, no thanks 
I'l be patient and wait some more 

That's the spirit!

[Dwyloc]

On the topic of battery life it would be nice to have the patch for the iPod nano battery meter committed so we can select the correct battery capacity for the nano and see more accurately what percentage of the battery is left.

http://www.rockbox.org/tracker/task/4998

[Llorean]

The battery capacity *only* affects the estimated time remaining.